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Tuesday, July 25, 2023

On a Lorquian trope

 Here is a Lorquian trope. I call it "the many Federicos." It can have several meanings. 

Not wanting to be limited by artificial horizons. "es imprescindible ser uno mil... en la eternidad tendremos el premio de no haber tenido horizontes."

Inauthenticity of living in the closet: I have never been born... a thousand García Lorcas..." [from a letter] 

Another, from a text not written by Lorca, but perhaps suggested by him... five or six Lorcas, because of the multiplicity of his activities. 

His professed love for "todas las poéticas." 

There is another instance of this trope in the suites, in which the self is conceived of as a water wheel.  

I relate this trope to the idea of negative capability (Keats). The idea that a self gets in the way. The poet is the least poetical thing possible, etc... 

I could put all of this together in an article... It would have the advantage of being very concrete and palpable.  This trope exists, and is in enough various texts. It is about the variability of the self, but it is, itself, something of variable meaning.  


***

There's a character in Of Human Bondage, Hayward. He is an aesthete, and he likes Roman Catholicism for the aesthetics, the incense, etc... Another character, Weeks, an American theological student, says that Hayward's faith is narcissist: his image of God is simply a reflection of his own superficial nature. "He believes in the picturesque." The self gets in the way.    






1 comment:

Andrew Shields said...

I read “Of Human Bondage” last year, in part because of the role of the film with Bette Davis in James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It On The Mountain”. It’s quite a book! I wrote a few pieces of daily prose about it; here’s one that links to your comment here, I think, on “aesthetic emotion”: https://andrewjshields.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-framing-of-world-and-generation-of.html